What Is Learned Helplessness And What Does It Teach Us About Emotional Management?
Since psychologist Martin Seligman developed the concept of learned helplessness during the 1960s, research in psychology has continued to yield interesting results that show new facets of this phenomenon.
Today we know that knowing well how it influences us is important to adopt a philosophy of life that allows us to face complicated situations. Therefore, in this article We will talk about what learned helplessness is and what it shows us about managing our emotions
Known as learned helplessness, a pattern of behavior that usually occurs when a subject is repeatedly exposed to a situation that causes discomfort and that they perceive as something that they cannot control or modify through their actions. Specifically, it is characterized by the adoption of an attitude of passivity and apparent resignation with what is happening (which does not mean that it suffers less).
Learned helplessness has been observed in both people and non-human animals, and is reflected in behaviors such as stopping trying to avoid a painful stimulus, giving up fleeing from a source of danger, etc.
Its importance is such that it has been widely investigated in such relevant contexts as hospitals, given that it has been seen that many patients fail to communicate how they are feeling or show symptoms that show the progression or persistence of the disease because they assume that They cannot do anything to improve their state of health, or even can lead to unnecessary harm during treatments for not expressing how they feel.
On the other hand, learned helplessness is closely related to the concept of locus of control. This is the type of belief through which people assume that what happens to them, whether good or bad, is caused by their own actions or, on the contrary, is generated by external circumstances, such as luck or the behavior of other people
For example, there are those who have a problematic locus of control because they assume that the good things that happen to them are due to the help of others and that the bad things that happen to them are their fault; Or, on the contrary, other people believe that what makes them suffer is always the fault of the world around them, and that the good that happens to them is always a reflection of their own merits.
In learned helplessness, the fact of suffering over and over again an unpleasant or physically or emotionally painful experience causes the person to internalize the idea that You can no longer do anything to get out of that situation on your own and that in any case the best thing that can happen is that something or someone intervenes so that this source of aversive stimuli stops affecting you.
The implications of learned helplessness in emotion management
As we have seen, learned helplessness means that, through the objective actions that occur to us in our environment, we draw conclusions about the degree of control we have over what happens to us. Therefore, through this psychological mechanism, It is very easy for us to fall into a pessimistic mentality that paralyzes us and that leads us to give up a series of options that are really within our reach, even if we are not aware of them.
For example, in a very famous experiment, a series of people were asked to perform a series of tasks that required concentration, while they were exposed to distracting sounds. Some of the participants were told that they could get up and turn off the sounds by pressing a button, while the others were not given that option.
Well then; Although in most cases the group of people with the ability to press the button could eliminate these distractions, in general they did not do so and preferred not to waste time to dedicate to the task; However, on average they showed significantly better performance than those who could not turn off those sounds. That is, the simple fact of knowing that they had more control over the situation allowed them to have a more proactive attitude towards the challenge before them
Thus, we must not forget that learned helplessness, which can occur in any person if the circumstances are right for it, can make us believe that we have less control than we really have, making us fall into a vicious circle of passivity and suffering. It is important to maintain a framework for interpreting reality that allows us to keep in mind that we always have a certain capacity for decision, whether about our environment or our own mental processes.
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